Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinak" data-source="post: 6201851" data-attributes="member: 6694112">I don't disagree the buzz is important, but much of that buzz is just the static of several thousand first glances. And there's certainly no test to prevent people without in-play experience from buzzing away.As a 4e non-fan, I don't think it's taking sides to say that most of the negative buzz around 4e at launch was based on a read-through or even just a glance. A lot of the traditional edition war arguments we still hear started as at-a-glance reactions around the same time.I personally know players who flipped open the 4e PHB, looked at one of the power lists, got through a few powers, closed the book, and never came back. Have they ever played 4e? Nope. Do they still badmouth 4e? Absolutely. Is that an informed opinion? Not in the slightest. But is it part of the buzz? Of course.And, to pick on myself a little, I happily talked up 3rd over 2nd during that transition because it read similarly to my houserules. It wasn't an in-play comparison, I wouldn't actually play 3rd until my wife started editing 3PP products years later. But, regardless of how ill-informed it may have been, it was still part of the buzz.That's all a long way of saying that buzz, positive and negative, is more noise than signal... particularly when we're talking about games where one campaign can last longer than the lifespan of an entire product line. And much of that noise is just people's first reactions looking at the books.Honestly, I think word-of-mouth is exponentially more important for independent games. They don't appear in traditional book stores, they may not appear in even good game stores, they need to catch your attention amid other indie games and obviously better-supported product lines, you're only going to find them on the web if you look, and they typically have no paid advertising.That said, I'll certainly agree it's an uphill battle for indies. You really want both word-of-mouth and for your game to read well. But if I had to choose one to be successful financially... well, "it's not what you know, it's who you know."Cheers!Kinak</blockquote>

Verification